Xeikon’s strategy of focusing on the label and packaging market is paying off with impressive growth. That was the key message during a press and analyst meeting, which the company hosted in in Orlando, Fla., in late November.

PrintCAN editor, fourth from left, and colleagues suit up to tour the Xymogen nutritional supplement facility in Orlando.

Company execs delivered an update on the company’s performance to date, and took the journalists and analysts to tour Xymogen, a manufacturers and distributor of nutritional supplements, which also houses a digital label printing shop with a Xeikon 3500 press.

CEO Wim Maes, said the company has seen huge growth with its labels and packaging business: it currently generates 51% of its revenue from the segment, compared to 23% in 2010, and to date it has installed more than 300 packaging and labelling presses worldwide.

Its revenue from press installations has grown at a compounded annual growth rate of more than 25% between 2011 and 2013. This year alone, the business grew 28%.

But Maes also indicated most of those placements are going into packaging shops as few commercial printers are embracing this market so far.

Labels in Motion, housed within Xymogen, does most of its work on a Xeikon 3500 digital press. The shop, which employs seven, says 60% of its work is for its parent company.

One of the debates currently taking place in the industry is whether liquid toner is advantageous to dry toner. Xeikon, for its part, said that it plans to focus on dry toner for this segment of the market. “Dry toner,” said Maes, “is still the best technology to reproduce full colour images with impact printing, while the business potential of inkjet is too small and divided over several players.” Toner also offers other advantages, such as white ink, and its compatibility with food products. “Dry toner checks all the boxes for labels and packaging right now,” said Maes.

Going forward Maes said Xeikon will focus on expanding its presence in the label and packaging market, continue to improve on the performance of dry toner technology; bring down the cost of digital label production; and ramp up growth in the document and commercial segments.

The company recently introduced two new presses. The Cheetah is for digital label production, which Xeikon describes as the biggest increase in 15 years on a dry toner platform. The Cheetah is 56% faster than Xeikon’s existing presses.

The Trillium is a liquid toner device that prints documents and commercial work at blistering speeds.